Victorian Literary Cultures

Studies in Textual Subversion

Contributions by Troy Bassett, Martin Bidney, Nancy Henry, Joseph Lennon, Ira Nadel, Ruth Robbins, Jeanette Shumaker, Alexis Weedon, Joseph Wiesenfarth Edited by Kenneth Womack, James M. Decker

Publication date:

24 May 2018

Length of book:

218 pages

Publisher

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

ISBN-13: 9781683930211

Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion provides readers with close textual analyses regarding the role of subversive acts or tendencies in Victorian literature. By drawing clear cultural contexts for the works under review—including such canonical texts as Dracula, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and stories featuring Sherlock Holmes—the critics in this anthology offer groundbreaking studies of subversion as a literary motif.

For some late nineteenth-century British novelists, subversion was a central aspect of their writerly existence. Although—or perhaps because—most Victorian authors composed their works for a general and mixed audience, many writers employed strategies designed to subvert genteel expectations. In addition to using coded and oblique subject matter, such figures also hid their transgressive material “in plain sight.” While some writers sought to critique, and even destabilize, their society, others juxtaposed subversive themes and aesthetics negatively with communal norms in hopes of quashing progressive agendas.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Subversive Literary Cultures by Kenneth Womack
I. Subversive Women
Chapter 1: The Mysterious Identity of Helen Dickens, Victorian Novelist by Troy J. Bassett
Chapter 2: Moonrise and the Ascent of Eve, the Woman Titan: Charlotte Brontë’s Epiphanies of the Fourfold Elemental Feminine by Martin Bidney
Chapter 3: Condoning Adultery: Problems of Marriage and Divorce in George Eliot’s Life and Writing by
Nancy Henry
II. Subversive Ideologies
Chapter 4: Unraveling Orientalism: Dawe’s “Yellow and White” by James M. Decker
Chapter 5: “A Familiar Kinde of Chastisement”: Fasting in the Nineteenth-Century by Joseph Lennon
Chapter 6: The Effect of Emerging New Media on Book Publishing: Lessons from the Origins of
Cross
Media Storytelling in the Early Twentieth Century for Contemporary Transmedia Researchers
by Alexis Weedon
Chapter 7: “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth”: Reading Levinasian
Ethics and
Literary Impressionism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by Kenneth Womack
III. Subversive Genres
Chapter 8: “Count Me In”: Comedy in Dracula by Ira B. Nadel
Chapter 9: “The Seasoned Spirit of the Cunning Reader”: The Textual Subversions of The Turn of the Screw by Ruth Robbins
Chapter 10: “Fallen” Clergymen: The Wages of Sin in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Charles Reade’s
The Cloister and the Hearth, and Henry Arthur Jones’s Michael and His Lost Angel
by Jeanette Shumaker
Chapter 11: Sherlock Holmes: The Criminal in the Detective by Joseph Wiesenfarth
Index
About the Editors and Contributors

This collection of essays opens with a strong introduction by Womack on the meanings of subversion... Subversiveness seems to be a wide net in which critics are sometimes subversive; at other times authors are subversive or they invoke genres that are already assumed to be subversive. The collection addresses biographical enigmas surrounding the public and private identities of individual writers—for example, Helen Dickens and George Eliot—and offers interpretations of major works by Charlotte Brontë, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. Jeanette Shumaker contributes a cogent essay on the gender connotations of “fallen” ministers such as The Scarlet Letter’s Arthur Dimmesdale, and Womack extends critical interest in the literary impressionism of Heart of Darkness into a thought-provoking examination of ethics via Hans Jauss’s reception theory. Readers will likely appreciate Alexis Weedon’s efforts to link the “cross-media business practices” of early-20th-century publishing to the media convergence model of the 21st century... Summing Up: Recommended...Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.